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February 20, 2007

A Qawwali Concert

A year or so ago, I attended an open-air Qawwali concert in Jaipur by the famous Sabri Brothers, who claim direct descent from Mian Tansen himself, the legendary Hindustani musician in Akbar’s court. Qawwali, for the uninitiated, is the devotional music of the Sufis of the Indian subcontinent. A famous recent exponent of the form was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

The concert, hosted by Rajasthan Tourism, was free to all. I noticed that the first quarter of the audience space was far better lit; it had nice sofas and comfy chairs and the quality of seating steadily declined further back. This front section was of course for “Invitation Only” pass bearers. (No points for guessing where I was.) I watched sodas being served by liveried waiters to these chosen people, cordoned off from the rest by ropes and policemen. At least one person expressed solidarity as I grumbled about this open discrimination at a tax-sponsored event.

The concert of course couldn’t begin until the chief guest had arrived, who was none other than Shrimati Vasundhara Raje Scindia, the Chief Minister of Rajasthan. As my father had predicted, she showed up an hour late – apparently a habit with her – in keeping with the time honored way of Indian honchos asserting their importance to the masses. Meanwhile, the audience had rearranged the neatly laid out chairs and blocked all passageways. I looked around from where I sat – there was no way to leave except to climb over chairs, which were now all occupied. In other words, I was trapped in the middle of a crowd getting boisterous by the minute. My attempts to relax and see the humor in the situation were proving only partially successful.

The concert finally began. The speakers were piercingly loud but the crowd fell silent for the most part. The two brothers sang rapturously of the glory and mystery of the almighty, His inscrutable ways, His grace and beauty manifest in the things of this world. This I liked; the music was pleasant enough, punctuated by energetic bouts of virtuoso vocal callesthenics. They represented a non-denominational religiosity that I no longer possess myself but which I understand and appreciate intellectually. To varying degrees, such mystical expression has flowered in every human culture.

Songs to the divine were interspersed with songs of love, suggesting that uniquely subcontinental mood of longing and desire for the human beloved. But the beloved they sang of was invariably and literally young, with flowing dark tresses, glowing fair skin, supple gait, intoxicating eyes. The idea of two graying, balding, paunchy men whipping themselves up in a lather conjuring up idealized feminine qualities best found in a few nubile women struck me as both perverse and comic. I wondered: How can this obsession with physical form qualify as great poetry?

A surfeit of puerile and soppy sentimentality from middle-aged men is what drove me off ghazals (a sister form of qawwalis) in the first place. Nothing of her mind or will; if she reacts at all, it is to tease and withhold; or she is adored like an ethereal being. It seemed to me that to these men, it was unthinkable to sing of the love of, say, a 60-yr old man for a 63-yr old woman. But the crowd was mighty pleased, bursting with wah, wahs – a stylized approval for a stylized emotion.

Most of their love songs struck me as no more sublime than a school-boy's crush, born of sexual inexperience. Indeed, too many secular love songs of the qawwali and ghazal kind that I recall have this quality – fitting products of a prudish culture where the youth typically acquired no "hands-on" experience with the opposite sex. Then they married a stranger, fossilizing many of their mawkish ideas about love. I couldn't help thinking: if only my fellow middle-class citizens got laid more often in their youth – experimenting, falling in/out with a partner or more before marriage – they would likely have less arrested ideas about love and the poetics of love.

Comments

Interesting. I never quite developed a taste for qawwalis while I was in India, but should probably try listening to them again.

A few quibbles: romantic poetry is not considered "great", at least not in a literary sense. However, in lyric form, it is quite popular in India, just as it was in much of the world until quite recently - the Beatles were singing moony yet beautiful songs like "And I love her" until 1964.

Secondly, popular art forms owe most of their longevity to ease of enjoyment. This means that they have to be somewhat familiar and easy to understand. It is devilishly difficult to introduce complex thought when working within these constraints, though someone like Sahir Ludhianvi did succeed in doing it a few times.

Finally, there is nothing wrong with paunchy middle-aged, balding men liking romantic poetry. I should like to remind you that this is a group that we might soon be unwilling members of!

The appreciation might well be for the ornamentation (Alankar) and word play, not necessarily for the theme of the poetry. That apart, even if middle-aged, balding men did work themselves up into a lather about ethereal romances, it is an act of imagination that attempts to transcend their current circumstances - an act that deserves no more contempt than does your attempt (or mine) to connect with Greek philosophy.

It’s true that in ghazals and qawwalis, just the music (or familiarity) can make them worth listening. In this they are similar to more popular music like that of Kishore Kumar or Beatles. We routinely enjoy songs whose lyrics we do not understand at all, or which are nothing much to write home about.

However, unlike other popular forms, there is a particular emphasis on the meaning and appreciation of words in ghazals and qawwalis. Live performers often deliver them like poetry readings; people do wah wahs, translate them like poetry, etc.

I simply question the quality of a class of lyrics as one would question the quality of, say, a class of movies. Calling them puerile and mawkish is no more contemptuous than calling James Bond's antics corny and silly (and seeking cultural/developmental explanations for their popularity). We express such opinions all the time. I said why their lyrics didn’t work for me. I didn’t say that the opposite reaction is wrong. Hey, I think it's far worse to be patriotic than to enjoy mawkish romantic poetry. :)

One wonders if the mawk-o-rama of misty-eyed Indian Babbitts dreaming of the fairy child -- where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth; she waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager! -- might benefit a bit from the history of the fairies.

Persian historian Ehsan Yar-Shater notes that "As a rule, the beloved is not a woman, but a young man. In the early centuries of Islam, the raids into Central Asia produced many young slaves. Slaves were also bought or received as gifts. They were made to serve as pages at court or in the households of the affluent, or as soldiers and body-guards. Young men, slaves or not, also, served wine at banquets and receptions, and the more gifted among them could play music and maintain a cultivated conversation. It was love toward young pages, soldiers, or novices in trades and professions which was the subject of lyrical introductions to panegyrics from the beginning of Persian poetry, and of the ghazal." (Yar-Shater, Ehsan. 1986. Persian Poetry in the Timurid and Safavid Periods, Cambridge History of Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.973-974. 1986) (From Wiki.)

Hazrat Amir Khusro adapted the Persian forms into the North Indian heartland in the 13th century. Khusro gradually formed an intense association with Nizamuddin Aulia that Wendy Doniger's children like Jeffrey Kripal would say was in its essense homoerotic. This is the Nizam of the standard Qawwali. One visualizes a despondent Khusro hanging around the edges of the 'court' of Hazrat Nizamuddin, impeded from approaching the saint by ecstatic swooning disciples:
Namidanam chi manzil bood shab jaay ki man boodam
Baharsu raqs-e bismil bood shab jaay ki man boodam
Pari paikar nigaar-e sarw qadde laala rukhsare
Sarapa aafat-e dil bood shab jaay ki man boodam.

I wonder what was the place where I was last night,
All around were half-slaughtered victims of love, tossing about in agony, where I was.
There was a fairy-like beloved with cypress-form and tulip-face,
Ruthlessly playing havoc with the hearts of the lovers, where I was.

This erudite disquisition regarding the connection between the ghazal and fairies is backed up well even by the history of the Urdu ghazal in the 18th and 19th centuries - see the essay by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi in the glossy volume "The Magnificent Mughals" (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002).

Nevertheless, 20th century romantic lyrics in Urdu (and Hindi) have tended to stay away from homoerotic themes, with occasional exceptions like the song Baharon phool barsao, mera mehboob aaya hai rendered by the mellifluous Mohammad Rafi.

O queen of the flowers, empress of the spring, your smile is devastating
Neither my heart nor I are conscious, the meeting of eyes is devastating
......
Raising and lowering, lowering and raising these venetian blind eyelashes is devastating]

The true waah-waah comes at the inspired flipping of uthakar girana and girakar uthana. The theme of the song is, of course, ridiculous.

vp: Are you sure the Baharon song is homoerotic? Any source you can point me to? It appears in a mainstream movie after all. The “aaya hai” need not be literally male in the same way “aayen hain” can refer to a kid in a somewhat flowery reference.

ds: Thanks for the history and the video links. Wonder what Mian Tansen would make of his descendants. The brothers have a lot more hair here than I thought they did.

Those college campus interpretations of Hindi film songs are an independent literary force by themselves! I remember some to this day - after decades. But it was always the boys who came up with the gems. I wonder why.

As for homoerotica in Arab / Persian / Turkish cultures, I have always wondered how it was reconciled with the Islamic prohibition against the practice of homosexuality. Although curiously enough, the description of heaven in the Quran includes the presence of smooth cheeked boys along with comely Houris.

Emperor Babur had openly pined for a boy and even written some verses to attest to his longings.

While attraction between men and boys has been historically tolerated in Islam, the trouble, curiously, begins with penetration. The Qur’an itself seems hostile to gay sex but what matters on the ground is the school of Islamic jurisprudence. The four main schools differ widely on the punishment and specific evidence required to prove gay liaisons (the multiple eyewitnesses clause is hard to satisfy, which also made it near impossible for women in some Muslim societies, including Pakistan until recently, to contest rape in court).

The penalties vary widely from country to country. Saudi Arabia’s official punishment for it is the death penalty though lighter punishment is common. Turkey officially is not far from EU standards. Check out this overview article for more on this topic.

Occassionally I scroll through your comprehensive Website.
Earlier this year (February) I sat at Qawvali Sufi concert in New delhi by visiting group from Pakistan/
That was my first introduction to it, well accepted by locals. too.